The eldest daughter of the German actor Klaus Kinski has claimed she was sexually abused by him when she was a child.

In an interview, Pola Kinski said her father, best known as the lead actor in films by the director Werner Herzog, repeatedly raped her over a 14-year period.

"He [Klaus Kinski] started touching me and kissing me with an open mouth when I was quite small, around five or six years old," she told Stern magazine in an interview published on Thursday, ahead of the publication of her autobiography in Germany next week.

Twenty years after his death the self-taught actor who became something of a German legend, is unable to answer the claims. But his daughter said that having spent years living in fear that no one would believe her she had finally decided to break her silence.

Pola Kinski, 60, lives in Germany and is also an actor. She said she suffered years of physical and verbal abuse at the hands of her father whose behaviour she said was often threatening.

"As a child I always had to keep my mouth shut because he was always threatening me. And I was dependent on him, on his affection."

She added that her father had told her his behaviour was quite natural. "[He said] all over the world fathers do the same thing with their daughters."

In her book Kindermund, or Child's Mouth, Pola Kinski goes into graphic detail of the alleged abuse by her father who died of a heart attack in 1991. She describes how torn she felt between wanting to please him and wanting to reject his advances. "Feelings of guilt torture me," she said. "That I disappointed him, that I ever let him do it. I cry unrestrainedly.

"I've written a book about it because I can no longer bear the fact that a person whose halo gets bigger from year to year is being glorified in this way."

She said she resented the fact that her father was increasingly hailed as an acting genius. "That's why I wanted to create a very clear picture of who this person really was," she said.

She told the magazine that she had never been able to watch any of her father's films in which he typically played tyrants, criminals and outlaws. "When I did catch a glimpse of one I always thought: 'he's precisely like he is at home'," she said.

"Whether people believe me or not, I was the one who experienced it," she continued. "It is the truth".

She added that she had not spoken about it to her half-sister, the actor Nastassja Kinski, who lives in the US, because they were not in contact. An agent for her half-brother, Nikolai Kinski, also an actor and based in Berlin, said he did not want to comment on the allegations.

Pola Kinski said she broke off all contact with her father when she was 19. When he died she felt no emotion, she told Stern. "When he died my mother [the singer Gislinde Kühlbeck], told me on the telephone and I felt nothing, neither a sense of sadness nor hate."

She said she hoped her book would help other victims of abuse gather the courage to tell their stories.

"In one way or another it's as if you've been given a life-long prison sentence," Kinski added.